I hope everybody's got their coffee. I'm actually on my third cup. I'm in Alabama on Chicago time, so this conference started at three in the morning for me.So, hopefully, that'll give me the energy I need to give you the insights that you're looking for. So we're gonna cover what is digital transformation and what is the in innovation adoption curve. How does that apply? We're gonna specifically look at The US manufacturing industry. There's a big push for digital transformation in that sector right now. So it's prime for a lot of these initiatives, But they're having some challenges. We'll go into what some of those are, and how diversity can help not only with digital transformation, but with US manufacturing in particular. So thank you for joining. My name is Alicia Kimiagharov. I'm currently the senior manager of reporting and analytics at CerroWire, which is a small to medium business in the copper wire manufacturing industry.

I have over a decade of analytical experience and progressively, leadership roles crossing Collins Aerospace, which is a retail technologies company, Carrier, which is an HVAC manufacturer, and the US Department of Labor. I've also worked as an international management consultant in countries like France, Japan, and South Africa. I have an MBA from the University of Florida and a psychology degree from Florida Atlantic University with a data science certification on top of that from the Stevens Institute of Technology. I'm currently sitting on an advisory board for a couple of companies that are funneling data talent into digital, initiatives for South Africa and Argentina. Beautiful for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. I did share that link in the chat. So what is digital transformation? What do I mean about innovation adoption curve? So I took this from IBM. I thought it was pretty, all encompassing. Digital transformation is a business strategy. Right? It's not an IT strategy.

It incorporates a digital technology across all areas of an organization. With the manufacturing that is everything from the executive leadership to the plant floor operators. It evaluates and modernizes organizations, processes, products, operations, and technology stack to enable continual rapid customer driven innovation. So this is the innovation adoption curve or what's commonly known as the s curve. So this is how fast does a market uptake new technology. This is based on psychological profiles that were established in the fifties. This and has since been applied to digital technology. Innovators and early adopters are the ones that are gonna really grab ahold of this technology first, whatever that technology is. They will vet it. They'll play around with it. They understand it. They get it. But there's not that many of them. So in terms of the overall market, adoption is still fairly low.

And once you hit the early majority, these are the folks that are keeping their ear to the ground but they aren't quite sure if they're ready for it yet. But once you hit that market, that's when adoption really starts to take off. The early majority will tend to lead the way in bringing along the late majority and the laggards. The late majority are those folks that they don't want to change, but now that it's been proven effective, they'll give it a try. The laggards, these are the ones that are still asking for their fax machines back. So those are the psychological profiles of the the s code. And you can see how this has played out with technology in most recent century.

Automobile, telephone, airplane, electricity, it looks a little bit more s y, but it's never an exact s shape. Right? Except for TV. TV is the weirdo here. It took about twenty years for it to really launch, but then color TV came out and it took off. The price of television stopped drastically and everyone was able to afford one. But you can see that as we get later in the technology phase, PCs, smartphones, plus the Internet, It's not really looking like an s anymore. What's most interesting today is that generative AI is almost a straight line up. Digital transformation is happening at much faster rates. We can no longer afford to wait for people to decide to do it.

We have to sort of push them or pull them a little bit into digital transformation adoption. And that's where US manufacturing is right now. It's primed for digital transformation. Why is this so important? Why do we care about US manufacturing? Well, aside from the fact that that's where most of my experience is, it's also a major contributor to The US economy. I was actually surprised to learn that the ROI for, the manufacturing industry is that for every dollar spent, it adds $2.69 to the economy. Our manufacturing is kind of the foundation of everything else. We need, the goods to be provided for additional other services, things like healthcare, finance, retail. It's really the driving force of value. What I also found interesting is that most of our manufacturing companies are not large corporations.

74% of manufacturing companies have fewer than 20 employees. So I would think with such a small group of people, it would be easy to adopt this digital technology. You don't have to convince as many folks to get on board. It's not necessarily the case. Another reason that US manufacturing is a big focus right now, I'm sure you've heard it in the news, is that China has overtaken The US as a manufacturing powerhouse. Even though The US still contributes more in terms of dollars than Germany, Japan, and South Korea, when it's the largest combined, we are still trying to catch up to a lot of the digitization that China has already implemented. This quickly became an issue during COVID and the supply chain crisis where it was apparent that we were not resilient in our supply chain because we were overly dependent on Chinese imports. They were manufacturing our parts, and then we were putting the parts together in The US, especially for the Department of Defense.

When I was working at Collins Aerospace, I was with the global strategic sourcing company during COVID, and we had 82% of our supply chain was no longer able to fulfill our orders. And a lot of that majority was coming from Chinese companies. So bringing manufacturing back to The US has not only become an economic imperative, but a national defense imperative. And you can see that across party lines. Ever since 02/2008, which is when China took the lead in super, in becoming a superpower in manufacturing, there have been many initiatives across party lines where bipartisan support manufacturing coming back to The United States, trying to build up our industry four point zero.

So industry four point zero is the marketing term for the fourth generation of industrial revolution. Incorporating digital technologies, such as three d printing, automation and robotics, smart sensors, big data, prescriptive analytics, machine learning, AI, everything under the sun. And the manufacturing is trying to do all of it at once. Now this has caused a bit of a discrepancy. Here we have a chart showing how quickly different industries adopt new technology, how resilient they are in maturing in that technology. No surprise here. IT and technology is at the top. Agriculture and government is at the bottom where that gray section is. But manufacturing has actually split. So you have advanced manufacturing. And these are the ones that are more able, that have better resources, they have a stronger workforce, that are able to adopt this digital transformation.

But remember, 74% of manufacturing are the little guys, the SMBs. So that's still under basic manufacturing and they are lagging behind. Main issues, around that is the digitization work and the digital spending on workers. Let me give you an example here. I went to a director and asked him if he'd received my email asking about, whether he'd tried a new technology. And he said he didn't see it because his secretary hadn't printed it out for him. This is what we mean by the digital spending on workers, skilling them up in how to use current technologies. So this leads us into what are some of the challenges that manufacturing are having. The workforce of today is being hired based on the workforce of yesterday.

So the job skill set of yesterday, which does not include digital literacy. It does not include technological development or STEM. So we're actually struggling to implement digital transformation now and we're going to continue to struggle if that doesn't change into tomorrow. As we're trying to bring on more advanced technology, the workforce needs to be able to use that information. Now manufacturing in general is expecting a large retirement boom in the next couple of years. So that gives you some idea as to the demographics, the age demographics of our current workforce. A lot of retirement, a lot of people going out. So now we're not only losing, the expertise, those decades of experience in the current way we work, but we're not funneling in the right folks that have the digital literacy to account for the skill set you're gonna need in the job for tomorrow.

So currently, this is the diversity. According to the 2022 Census Bureau, The US manufacturing industry is primarily white, is primarily male, and is primarily of a high school or some college equivalent with the exception of roles that require bachelor's degree such as engineering or technology. Now they are trying to turn this around. There's a commitment to diversity in manufacturing, But with the executive leadership not being diverse, it's very difficult for them to build an inclusive, diverse workforce. Sort of a catch 22. How do you build a diverse workforce when the people that you need to onboard are seeking a diverse workforce? So they end up hiring people because they're trying to build a diverse workforce, but then they leave.

Those people are not supported in being able to retain those jobs or or see themselves moving up in their positions. So it's sort of a chicken or the egg dilemma. Is this especially true for women? Because manufacturing roles typically are not work life balanced. You have to be there at your shift at certain times. There's night hours, there's, weekends. You also don't have a lot of flexibility. If you're at the plant, you know, working with robotics, you have to be physically there. You don't have the work from home option. There's a lot of, challenges in how to redesign job structure so you can retain the level of diversity that you're aiming for. Goal of this to say, manufacturing has two challenges aside from the normal digital adoption challenge, which is called the chasm between getting the pragmatists on board so that they can lead the way for the conservatives and the skeptics, manufacturing has this problem.

It's a little bit skewed to the right where you have more skeptics and more conservatives, fewer pragmatists. So how do you bring the conservatives and the skeptics over? How do you change this curve? That's the workforce development part. Then also, how do you leverage this type of environment to build the digital transformation adoption strategy? So let's talk about what diversity is and how it can help with digital transformations. So when we're limited in the diversity of our environment, we don't have the age, race, gender diversity that we expect or that we're looking for. We need to expand our definition of diversity. And this is actually more fruitful for a, a development team anyway. Because even though race, age, physical ability, these things are easier to measure, they're easier to track, but they don't necessarily give you the strategic diversity that you need to leverage digital transformation adoption.

So you need to think about other things such as marital status, military service, work location, especially important in manufacturing, union affiliation, seniority. The work culture in manufacturing is highly dependent on how long you have been working at a company. So taking these into account can help you find the diversity that you need to leverage. There's a poll actually that I set up here. We'll see if it works. But if you can take that poll real quick, try to tell me what is your ideal workplace? Which of these dimensions of diversity are most important for you when you're looking for a place to work? Internal dimensions, external dimensions, or organizational dimensions? I would also add, if I could add another, wheel around this, the diversity of the psychological profiles from the innovation adoption curve.

So the conservatives, innovators, politicians and laggards, another set of diversity metrics. Diversity is critical for innovation and profitability. This was shown by the World Economic Forum back in 2019, but it can also enable companies to drive their digital literacy. They're reskilling and upskilling their current workforce, but hiring and developing pilot pipelines focused on those technology skills can help companies to leverage that diversity. It also enables the culture of faster innovation and creativity, psychological safety. The more diverse, people are around you, the more likely you are to talk to somebody about something that needs to be fixed. And it also helps build your resiliency and adaptability. If you have more perspectives and mindsets to pull from, your problem solving skills are going to be faster.

And of course, the mindset to influence change. If you're trying to change the culture, if you're trying to change, the way you think about digital technology, having that diversity will help build other skill sets such as emotional intelligence, cultural diplomatic communication, right, critical thinking, learning new skills and how to apply them, especially critical when you're trying to build digital literacy, and, of course, cross functional collaboration.

Women in particular have a particular skill set. The Pew Research Center did a survey where people recognized women in leadership positions as being more likely to be ethical, more likely to stand up for their beliefs or stand up for others, provide fair pain and benefits to better mentoring and compromising. So women in particular have a great opportunity to help drive the changes in manufacturing, not just from a technology standpoint, but from a people standpoint. Adoption is as much about psychology as it is about technology. I also wanted to call out from the survey that women were, less willing to take risks, but this is a good thing. One of the reasons that laggards don't accept technology right away is because they are risk averse.

So women also being risk averse can go to them with that commonality, build that rapport, and help bring them into the fold. Manufacturing is committed to diversity and not just diversity, of the internal dimensions, but across the board. Carolyn Lee is the now president of the Manufacturing Institute. Sarah Bruner recently became the director of communications at the National Association of Standards and Technology. These are leading by example that women and diverse populations are valued in manufacturing. There's also talent pipeline, connections being made. So the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education is reaching out to universities, colleges, and trade schools to help advance the manufacturing workforce and STEM careers. And the Manufacturing Institute's Innovators Quest is actually a K through 12 program providing, diversity and inclusion training around STEM so that when those kids are ready to join the workforce, they would be able to participate in the the changing culture.

So manufacturing is adopting diversity. They've made a pledge for 23, over 25, different manufacturing companies in The United States. Large companies have pledged to drive diversity within their hiring practices. They are hiring for digital skills. They're partnering with universities. They're reskilling their current labor force. They're building centers of innovation. I was actually just at, Marmon conference, our parent company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, to build ERGs and centers of innovation for digital technology. So we can have a support group across multiple manufacturing companies, across multiple industries, aerospace and defense, railroad, food food administration, all of that to be able to build the bridges that we need to cross the chasm of adoption. And, of course, the accountability for inclusion, making sure that people in the current workforce are ready and willing to support and retain the diversity that gets hired. In turn, diversity will fuel the digital transformation initiatives that are happening in manufacturing.

They bring multiple adoption mindsets, digital literacy, psychological safety, conceptual thinking, cross functional collaboration, all of the skill sets that a company needs in order to leverage technology for digital transformation. Alright. So how do we actually do that? At Collins Aerospace, we had a saying. We built planes in the department's defense. And so we talked about implementing digital technology as, changing the engine while the plane is flying. You have to continue your day to day manufacturing output, but you're also trying to completely upend how that process works. So you're changing the engine while trying not to crash the plane. So manufacturing has these two challenges, the chasm and the left skew. So we can't really leverage the pragmatists the way that traditional innovation adoption would normally do it.

Bring the pragmatists on board, the conservatives and skeptics will follow at their leisure. But due to the rate of technological, adoption, and the challenges that manufacturing is facing, we really need to change which group we target. We need to focus on the skeptics first. This is where it's particularly critical to have the diversity mindset and include the inclusion because you need to include the skeptics in early stages of development. So I was working at Collins Aerospace, and global strategic sourcing is across 14 divisions, three different countries, very disparate group of folks, all trying to work together. And what the digital technology they were using at the time, they had recently implemented Teams and SharePoint. Now they were able to share files, unilaterally.

And I reached out to somebody who was not sharing their files. They continued attaching it in an email, which caused other people to then have to download it, create a new version, send it back. It was a mess. So I reached out to him and said, Well, how come you're not using, SharePoint? This is how it works. And I can show you how to do this a little bit easier. He said, Well, I didn't choose that technology. It's being pushed onto me. That's not what I wanted to do. So if you can bring the skeptics in early on any decisions that are getting made, on any tools that are being developed, You can ask them for their expertise.

Keep in mind, these are not obstacles. These are not wayward souls that are just need to get with the times. These are experts in their field. Oftentimes, they've been with the company twenty, thirty, forty years. So bringing them in early, finding the skeptics that you can engage with, build a rapport with, and leverage their expertise to make your tool better is going to bring them in for engagement. Sometimes you have to prove the benefit of technology with small, quick things. So rather than trying to launch an entire digital ecosystem all at once, figuring out what is their pain point today that you can fix right now. I had a 44 year old man show me how he was building his forecast model, which model is a very generous word. It's forecast graph.

And the way he was doing it is he was exporting data from Power BI, manually copy and pasting it over to Excel. And then not even using pivot tables, just putting, charts and graphs right on top of the data and then wondering why his sales forecast was always so off. So I took a look at his Excel file, and my first thought is we could do this in machine learning. Sales forecasting, demand planning, these are the kinds of things that are right for machine learning digital transformation initiatives. But that's not what he was ready for. He was just looking for a faster way to use Excel. So we set up a live connection to our database so he didn't have to copy and paste that information.

He could just click a refresh button and everything would automatically update live with current information. And he was very happy with that. But now we've seen his file. Now we understand how he's building his sales forecast and we can present new ways to continue to iterate on what he's already built and work with him work with him to develop the next stage of that digital transformation. So I like to use the term deferred adoption. So rather than saying that the they're resistant or that there's something wrong with the way that they think, which is not true, there's a reason that they think the way they do. I build it into my adoption rule out there. So deferred adoption is a strategic decision that not everyone will get on board right away, but that is okay. Those are the folks that we're going to bring them in one at a time.

Sometimes you have to meet with them one on one, you have to go to the plant, you have to talk to them in person and you have to understand their resistance. Sometimes it's, well, I just don't have time to learn something new. Or I tried something new before, and it didn't work out, and I'm done fine. Or there's always something new that the new that the leaders are pushing out. The executives change their mind every year. Why bother learning this? It's just gonna change. So going to them and understanding their mindset and saying, okay, you don't have to adopt this right now. I'll work with someone else. We'll get them up to speed. And once all the kinks have been worked out, once we've addressed all of the issues that you've raised with me, which are great issues, those are excellent points, then we'll circle back around and we'll see if we can have this conversation again. So deferred adoption is part of your rollout plan.

So here are a couple of other points I wanted to bring up in terms of how to strategically communicate with the left side, with the curve and then bringing that over to bridge the chasm. So you're using the skeptics, converting them into advocates so that they can actually lead the way for adoption. Again, you're not pushing a solution. You're not telling them what to do. You're not changing the nature of their work. You're offering to solve a problem. And sometimes that starts small and works its way up. Establishing an adoption plan, letting people know that, yes, we understand not everyone is gonna uptake this technology right away, but it's imperative to, to make sure that you have a lost sight of them and that that's part of the adoption later on. And I'll I noticed that I'm running out of time, so I'm gonna skip over this one, but I will add it.

If you want my PowerPoint, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can connect with me. I'll be glad to go into this in more detail or share any of these slides with you. The last point I wanted to just bring right here, all of these traits and strategies that I've talked about fall under the umbrella of inclusive leadership. So having a diverse workforce sets the stage, but inclusive leadership leverages the potential. And one of my favorite stories about this is identifying a digital transformation ambassador. So I recognize that my MBA, my international experience, and my lack of work on a manufacturing floor did not prime me to be a good ambassador for digital transformation and manufacturing. But I did have someone on my team that had been with the company for years. Her father grew up in the town where our corporate headquarters are.

Her brother's in the military. She was a good ambassador, culturally speaking, to go to this group of digital laggards and say, hey. I'm one of you. Let's figure out what you need from this technology so that we can provide you with the solution. So she actually became our digital transformation ambassador and she's had great success. She goes, she meets with these people one on one, she talks about their families, and they talk to her. Right? They're open to that psychological safety. They're open to telling her what the pain points are so we can address those issues. So I would just change, the definition of digital transformation to include people because digital transformation is changing the diversity of the workforce as well as enabling global competitive advantage.

So I would just ask everyone in the audience, don't discount jobs in manufacturing. Manufacturing is prime for digital transformation and they need, especially women in technology, to help, bridge that gap. Seek out strategic differences, not just, appearance differences, but actually the psychological differences between different groups. Leverage your diversity. Don't forget to speak up. Your opinions are just as critical as everyone else's to success. And, of course, good career advice overall. Building your own support network. US manufacturing is is still struggling to get there, but, feel free to reach out to me or build up your own network for emotional resilience. Thank you very much.